My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant.
He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".
He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.
It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?
Yes, but the funny thing is that.. for a guy worried about how hard his worker bees are working / how focussed they were during COVID.. he dropped A LOT of tracks during COVID.
In fact, almost his entire track history was during COVID.. in a time that the company he runs has had some headline-grabbing losses in their consumer division.
So I think its fair to say he should focus on his own productivity here first.
You'd be surprised how often "live set" is a synonym for "USB stick."
The scene is notorious for it. It's really not hard to find vids of DJs dancing, pointing, posing, and poking uselessly at a mixer which is obviously just there for the look.
There's also a huge difference between a "live set" and a "DJ set". I'm surprised people here on HN don't realize this.
A "live set" typically involves the performer playing synths and programming the drums live. There are no record players, no pre-recorded tracks, everything is played live on the fly. Example: https://youtu.be/cVFzblT5VPE?t=4177 (a daytime one so you can see the gear)
With a "DJ set", the DJ is playing two or more tracks, beatmatching them and mixing them together, transitioning from one track to the next. This still takes a lot of skill. If you see two or more turntables or media players and a mixer in the middle, that's a DJ set. Often the DJ brings their tracks to the venue loaded on a USB stick and plugs it into the media player. Just because there's a USB stick present doesn't mean the DJ set was pre-recorded. Example: https://youtu.be/Ubyd98XV5C0?t=1018
Does he do live sets (realizing the definitions are loose but essentially creating music live with something like an Ableton) as opposed to DJ sets (basically mixing pre-recorded tracks live, what most DJ performances are)?
I've never seen him perform but a DJ set ranges from people who just hit the play button and follow a recipe (e.g. Paris Hilton) to very technical mixing (e.g. Maceo Plex). A live set is substantially more challenging (and why few do it) but would be strong support he's not having his released tracks ghost produced.
Either way, good for him in my opinion. I also like mixing as a creative outlet but am terrible at it. If I was worth 9 figures I'd probably get a ghost producer to help me out and enjoy the experience of DJing.
David Solomon only really pitches himself as a hobbyist anyway so I don't think there's anything misleading/shameful about it if he is in fact just getting everything ghost produced and doing a 'lite' mixing DJ set live. There are plenty of full-time "professional" DJs who do the same thing.
He could be pulling something like 1/2 million as a DJ. Still a side gig, but not quite as trivial especially when his CEO pay isn’t directly tied to hours worked.
“His Spotify profile has 550,000 monthly listeners with his debut single garnering 8 million listens.”
Precisely.
He couldn't put it into words because the words wouldn't have looked good.
But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.
I have not run into this attitude in tech from executives. Finance is much more of a heiracy culture I guess.
I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.
It certainly varies. I've had a casual relationship with senior execs (subject of course to understanding that they get to make the decisions at the end of the day). However, I've heard the stories about some senior execs that are of the mindset of "Don't make eye contact with me unless you've been spoken to." I didn't quite believe it at first because it's never been my experience but it's a thing.
I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.
Yes it is a thing. It starts when you get promoted to a more senior role. The thing is, nothing much changed inside or outside, so many people feel they need to make a point. They start to dress differently, behave differently, introduce distance - to make sure others understand who is in the "superior" position.
I noticed thin in insecure types or those who need some confirmation of their value. But there are many people who are exact opposites, especially in the younger generation. They understand that being a manager doesn't mean giving orders but supporting your team in their work. It's so much easier for everybody.
There are executive-class perks in most medium-to-large companies, but at least in tech, they're kept on the down low so you have to kind of look for them to find them. Personal assistants are probably the most visible. Private meeting rooms / bathrooms / entrances for the executives, chauffeurs, cooks, masseuses, access to corporate jets, hard-to-get tickets to sporting / arts events, separate housing allowances and company-paid villas, personal security, lots of financial perks like wealth management tools, free tax services, deferred comp and supplemental retirement savings. But these things don't tend to get flashed in front of the worker-bees.
Small biz bros are worse.
My wife left finance to work for a small (50-200) person business for a few years. Couple brothers that inherited it from daddy. Got all their kids / kids friends nepobaby jobs.
Probably the worst scenario of business owners you can work for.
Toxic small businesses can be really toxic. There's a lot of this in northern Italy, which is actually a pretty productive, wealthy area. But they'd be better off if there was more consolidation and some new blood. Tons of companies where grandpa founded it after WWII, and worked his hands to the bone. The son inherited it, maybe went to college and grew it and improved it some, and the grandkids are all about booze and cars and women.
OTOH, a good small company can be really good. Decisions get made quickly, you know most of the people and can talk with them, much less BS, and more of a sense of purpose in what you're doing there rather than being a cog. I worked in one a few years back and loved it. They are tough to find, though, as a real 'small company' is different than a startup in that they're a bit less crazy in terms of growth.
Small businesses can have their own set of issues which are probably different than those you encounter at a big company but they can be just as bad or worse. (Oh, and if you're in business for yourself, you need to do a lot of selling and need to deal with clients directly.)
Not even. He was upset because the presence of his middle-class employee in his previously-upper-class restaurant — especially with the employee visibly performing middle-class behaviors like a lack of consideration of discretion (and then not being told to sit down by the restaurant staff!) — was tarnishing the restaurant's upper-class image, i.e. the usefulness of using eating there as an upper-class shibboleth.
Or, to put that another way: if the CEO can't use "come eat with me at $place" as a way to say to investors and other CEOs that he's "one of them" and can be let in on the backchannel conversations, then why is he even eating there? It's expensive and the service is awful! He'd much rather not! Now he needs to find a new place to use to signal that!
I would love to hear the "backchannel" conversations happening between people like Musk, Altman, the Google guys and their cronies. It often "feels" like they are planning something nefarious longterm but I can't exactly see the big picture so im not sure.
The sad thing is that when it's come out (e.g. the twitter court case), it's been shockingly vapid. And free of people challenging each other even when the ideas are so obviously bad.
I thought that it is quite obvious: a "new aristocracy", separate from the "masses" and protected by the law while not held accountable by it. It's not quite that there is a "master plan" and coordinated "conspiracy" -- it's simply that the humans have a tendency to protect themselves by isolating from "others". And when you have the wealth and power, this separation quickly becomes very unbalanced.
In Middle Ages, this separation was based on ownership of land and societal structure which soon started being formalised in (both religious and secular) laws. Today, money has the same purpose (being a measure and store of wealth).
Exactly! It's like Musk demanding everyone comes into the office while he is only in the office at individual companies 1 or 2 times a week. CEO of Tesla, a publicly traded company spends all his time in the privately held offices of Twitter. Can other of his company employees work multiple jobs including their own personal company?
Have you heard of phrases like "old money" and "new money"? Or "upper middle" and "lower upper"?
The reason they're used more is because there is a very clear distinction between groups even at high levels of wealth due to the need to socially signal. This is what causes CEOs to flip out that an analyst is trying to casually talk to them at a non-work event as if they are equals.
This is class dynamics in action, it's not all about the working class vs upper class, but how these different classes interact internally and externally.
People like to find ways to feel superior to others regardless of how much money they have. Money is just one of the easiest and most transversal ways.
But feeling like you have better opinions or thought deeper about subjects than others or that you know "how it really is", or that you're a better driver or whatever are other common ways. Whatever you feel like you are good at, or have a lot of, you will be tempted to feel superior about.
Fighting these thoughts is virtuous in my opinion. Pretending that only X type of people do it (rich or whatever) is not virtuous in my opinion.
There can be many class horizons, it could very possibly be that the young analyst would dislike a plumber (as in someone owning a plumbing comapany) talking casually to him, the plumber a retail casher, the retail casher an homeless person.
Upper vs working the most important divide (IMHO), but not the only one.
A junior analyst at Goldman Sachs who's having lunch in the Hamptons, in a restaurant the CEO also goes to, is probably upper class, just very young/recenly graduated though we don't know the details.
Social class is not just about your current salary, although 200k soon after graduation isn't exactly 'average'...
Some might even say that walking up to the CEO like that indicates upper class self-assurance...
Taking the other side - the junior was out to lunch with a bunch of coworkers.
In the office setting the CEO would never been seen anywhere near the same floor that such junior people are working or eating, never having the opportunity to introduce themselves. One bank famously had a special CEO elevator so the guy could seamlessly get from the garage to his high-rise executive suite without bumping into a single soul.
I recently found myself out to dinner a table over from a C-suite exec at my company. I did not introduce myself because I'm a socially damaged introvert.
It's a pretty easy bet that the kid was a major extrovert on the other hand, more than some assumption they must already be upper class.
You'd be surprised about the class mobility on Wall St vs other industries. When I graduated, Google famously did not even recruit from anything other than a small handful of schools and screened out a pretty high GPA minimum like 3.75 or so. Meanwhile every bank came to my college and I had like 5 offers. A good number of my coworkers spent some time at community college, had parents without college degrees, are first gen immigrants, etc.
Outside of glad-handing networking roles that lean on peoples connections like in IB, "already rich" is the exception rather than the rule. Bear was famous for saying they didn't hire MBAs, but instead PSDs — poor, smart and had a deep desire to be rich
Finance is kind of unique is that it’s a weird mix of a strict meritocracy and a deeply seated upper crust that’s incredibly nepotistic.
The meritocrats are the ones that work the jobs where they actually have to make money and profits. Nepos are shunted to roles where that isn’t as direct.
I like to believe the analyst likely came from money. The son of another executive possibly? Which would explain why he was at this restaurant in the Hamptons. And likely why he didn’t flinch to introduce himself.
"a lot" describes one area in one department in very large global organizations.
For every daddy money nepobaby, theres 1000 other roles filled by people who got there the hard way. There's only so many of these people you can find if you are hiring for orgs of 50K people.
This recent (and self-serving) tendency of reducing “class” to only the extremely wealthy and everyone else is reductive and obscures important economic dynamics. It’s ridiculous to treat a master plumber that owns a plumbing business as “bourgeoise” while treating an Amazon engineer who has tremendous human capital as being a “proletariat.” Even in Marx’s time, there was substantial debate about how to classify the salaried professionals that served as the agents of the capital owners.
In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital. The two groups have myriad common interests. Those interests are in many cases in opposition to those of ordinary workers who lack human capital and are fungible and easily replaced.
You think software engineers aren’t fungible? Facebook hires SWE’s based on generic technical interviews and doesn’t even assign them a team until week six.
That just means they’re not literally irreplaceable, not that they’re fungible. The pool of people who could do the job, even with training, is a tiny fraction of the overall population.
Well paying engineers is more of a function of US dynamics in tech. Engineering salaries are down to earth basically everywhere else.
They’re proles by the definition of how they earn their labor. If the pool of labor expands beyond the available roles, those high salaries would crash down.
If you want to get pedantic, we could more precisely define the upper-class as those who extract value from others, and the lower classes as those from which said value is extracted from.
Were we to push that to the extreme, the only upper-class at Goldman Sachs would be retirees, either as direct shareholders or as beneficiaries of some pension fund. Even if they were lower middle-class Americans living in an old aging house they can’t afford to fix.
That would be the Value Extraction definition of Class.
Others would argue that class is more diffuse, and that one’s class depends more on their family's history, where they went to school, and who they know, than on how much they have. Which is a valid point.
That would be a Social Capital definition of Class.
I doubt however that anyone would consider a street-sweeping former Emperor (eg Piyin), or some penniless heir to some old industry dynasty as still belonging to any sort of upper-class.
Meaning the actual definition actually is some fluid mix of the two. That and probably some other definitions I’m not even aware of.
> In the modern economy, capital owners are reliant on a class of non-fungible white collar workers that bring their own human capital.
It’s nothing modern. Capital owners always have, since the first scribe, and probably before that (see Japan’s former hordes of perpetually desk-bound samurai).
Still, let’s entertain the argument. I’ll use, and I’m truly sorry for that, a tired analogy.
In the modern world, many people are reliant on many different types of usually non-fungible pets and somewhat fungible, depending on who you ask, animals, for many different purposes. Some of which bring their own highly sought-after hard-earned skills.
Let’s limit ourselves to the oh so tired dog analogy.
A person and their dog have myriad common interests. Those interests are, in many cases, in opposition to those of many other people and animals. Even more so when said dog is considered a family member, serves as a guard dog, as a shepherd dog, or is specialised in drugs detection.
Does that make them equal? Does that change anything to the fact that one is extracting value from the other, and often only pays them back in dog food, usually made from our food industry’s literal scraps and refuse?
So yes, I agree with you: there’s no simple and definitely no simplistic definition of class.
I am still convinced however that, in the specific and limited context of the comment I was replying to, the one I used was good enough.
A farmer’s dog may be eating the scraps, but has a fundamentally different role in the farm as an enterprise than the animals the dog is herding.
By your value-extraction definition, Sundar Pichai isn’t upper class. He doesn’t make money from his ownership of the capital—he owns a negligible share of Alphabet. Instead, he helps the shareholders extract more value from Alphabet and is compensated for that work. A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
I think a more useful definition recognizes that, in between shareholders and the workers is a class of people who help the shareholders extract more value from the enterprise, and therefore has interests closely aligned with those of the shareholders. For example in a company like Uber, that’s what the programmers are doing. They’re not creating value, they’re building systems to extract more value from the drivers.
Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism. $500,000/year Facebook engineers only exist because Facebook as an enterprise throws off enormous amounts of cash. If you look at more social-democratic societies, the biggest difference isn’t at the very top. Sweden and Norway have more billionaires per capita than the United States. Instead, the biggest difference is in the professional class. Swedish engineers (and bankers and lawyers and other professionals) make a fraction of what their American counterparts make. And that’s because Sweden has far fewer of these insanely high margin businesses.
> A farmer’s dog may be eating the scraps, but has a fundamentally different role in the farm as an enterprise than the animals the dog is herding.
And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps. Precisely the analogy’s entire point. I’m Glad I didn’t have to spell it out.
> A definition that excludes CEOs from the upper class isn’t a very workable one.
Absolutely. Hence the "Were we to push that to the extreme", followed by a ridiculous application of the definition.
> Another way to look at it is that there’s a large class of people whose jobs wouldn’t be nearly as well compensated without monopolistic capitalism.
And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools.
Interesting bit about Sweden and Norway. I didn’t know that.
> And yet they are both animals, often get treated as less than most people, the shepherd dog only gets the proverbial scraps.
Yes, but focusing on those factors gives you an incomplete understanding of the dog’s place on the farm. At the end of the, day the dog is helping the farmer extract value from the sheep. Indeed, the dog’s very specialized skills wouldn’t have much value outside the context of the farming enterprise. That means the dog’s interests are much more aligned with the farmer’s than the sheep. His unique role, and relatively comfortable position, wouldn’t exist outside the value-extractive context of the farm.
> And thus we can differentiate those of these people who are part of the upper class from those who aren’t by wether they get an actual share of the value they produce, or merely scraps. Wether they are compensated as equals, or as useful tools
Facebook engineers building the infrastructure the company uses to extract monopolistic profits from consumers are receiving a share of the value. The actual value creation ultimately comes from someone making shoes in a factory in China, which sells them to Nike, which uses Facebook advertising and branding to sell them to consumers for far more than they’re worth. Yes, he’s a “useful tool” for the shareholders, but so are the senior executives (besides Zuck). Their ability to command $500,000 salaries or $1 million salaries, or $10 million salaries doesn’t exist outside the context of these enormous monopolistic profits.
You’re getting hung up on “equality” but being in the same class doesn’t mean you’re equal. In a feudal society, knights may be quite lowly compared to a high ranking landowner. They’re “useful tools.” But I’m not talking about equality of rank, I’m talking about interests and incentives. On that front, the knights have fundamentally different interests and incentives than the serfs. Whatever resentment they might have toward higher ranking nobility, they still reap the benefits of the feudal structure. The my would be much worse off outside that structure.
I’m not hung up on equality. I’m hung up on the huge gap between some and the rest of the world.
Which, to me, reflects a huge gap in power and freedom.
One decides what the other does. One can decide how much the other will earn. One can decide wether or not the other will still have a job tomorrow. The other needs a job if they want to have a roof over their head and food on the table in six months.
Which is why I still don’t find your definition satisfactory. Sure alignment of interests matters, but to me it’s not enough.
It’s been an insightful discussion, and I’ve truly enjoyed it, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to reach a conclusion we can both agree on.
The middle class is gone now so that's kind of fitting. I like the term "working class" as in "I need to work to survive". It covers a huge breadth of the population but that's better anyway imo
Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper
People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?)
Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of US$25 million is undeniably upper class but still far beneath the centibillionaire class.
There’s also no clear boundary between upper middle and lower upper. You may think someone on US$250K is “upper class” but they probably only think of themselves as “upper middle class”, and personally I would think the same. In my own head, to really be upper class, your annual income has to be (consistently) measured in millions, not hundreds of thousands.
I've always thought all those granular "upper lower upper class" and "middle lower upper class" and "upper middle upper lower middle class" distinctions were pretty pointless and mainly are for the people who care deeply about constructing a societal totem pole and placing everyone precisely somewhere on that totem pole.
The huge class divides are not between retail workers, tradesmen and software developers, the divide is between C-suite executives / old money, and... everyone else who has to work for a living.
As a tech worker, I have far more in common lifestyle-wise with a schoolteacher than I do with the SVP of Engineering in my own company.
You can be broke and upper class; rich and 'working'. Economists/historians/et al. call it socioeconomic class: I think the latter dominates in the US, and the former in the UK. If I (British) thought of or described someone as being of a particular class, it would be far more a comment on their actions or behaviour than their job or salary. To the point that it's weird to me how it's discussed here when we basically don't know either of them; if anything we know more about DJ D-Sol and it's a slightly (but certainly not definite) downward hint.
Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class. I should have specified I'm talking about American-style economic class.
In the US, working class tends to mean people in food service, retail sales, low-skill manual labor, people relying on gig work, and some very low-level white-collar workers like secretaries. Upper class are basically the very few people for whom work is optional. F500 CEOs, SVPs, billionaire investors, and so on. Their existing wealth grows at a rate that can sustain their and their family's standard of living indefinitely.
The rest is middle class, a very wide range from schoolteachers, to skilled tradesmen, to engineers, to university professors, to small business owners, to doctors and so on.
My point is that people are nit-picking when they say things like "Oh, but doctors are upper middle class and teachers are lower middle class and engineers are lower upper middle class and on and on and on. Distinction without a meaningful difference.
> Good point. I am aware of the differences between social class as it is in the UK and economic class.
I think traditional concepts of social class count for a lot less in the UK of 2023 than they did in the UK of 1973. But wealth counts for just as much, even more.
Were Rishi Sunak's parents "upper class"? And yet, he'd surely be a far more valuable social connection to have than Baron Forgettable who happens to be the King's fifth cousin. And I think that will remain true even when his prime ministership is over.
There are other dimensions than number of millions; money might be an universal measure, but people are different.
Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?
> Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck?
I think Western society has been undergoing a transition between two different class systems. (Marxists would surely connect this with the economic transitions from feudalism to mercantilism to early capitalism to late capitalism.)
In the mediaeval class system, class was determined by social status which was predominantly inherited, and money alone was not enough to move from the bottom to the top. A person born poor might acquire great wealth, but they would still be locked out of the nobility/aristocracy, unless the monarch deigned to ennoble them. An impoverished baron socially outranked the far wealthier merchant who was born into poverty and worked/lucked their way out of it.
In the late capitalist class system–all that really matters is your net worth. Everything else is secondary. Who cares who your parents were or where you come from once you have a billion dollars to your name – and if a billionaire is excluded socially, it is very likely due to something about their individual behaviour (see e.g Kanye–although I suppose he's an ex-billionaire now), rather than their family background in itself.
The transition between the two systems has been ongoing; it still hasn't completely finished, but we've moved a lot closer to the late capitalist system, and a lot further away from the mediaeval system, than we were 50 or 100 years ago. I don't think the transition proceeds at the same rate in every country either – I think the UK retains more of the old class system than most other places (although even in the UK it is a lot weaker than it used to be); it also arguably retains some strength in the northeastern US, although not to the same extent as the UK.
I was just picking two specific old men that you don't know but probably knew each other, one already dead, as an extreme example of old money (and aversion to work) vs. new money (and excessive ambition).
My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
> My point is that different people look up (or down) to different people by different criteria: "net worth" interests competitive capitalist adventurers, "who your parents were or where you come from" remains a high priority when someone is wealthy enough for their lifestyle.
I certainly find it plausible that if A and B are of roughly similar wealth, but A was born into wealth whereas B lucked/worked/married into it, A might see that as a reason to look down on B.
However, I suspect if A was born into $100 million and B lucked/worked/etc into $100 billion, then all else being equal, I doubt A would look down on B in the same way. I expect they'd more likely view B with envy, as a potential business opportunity for themselves, as a friendship which might give them access to things they themselves can't afford, than as a social inferior. When the gap in wealth becomes big enough, it tends to drown out all the other factors.
Yes, even well paid worker bees are still worker bees.
The queen bee who owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees, etc.. now thats a different class.
What about managers/trainers of sports teams, if the stars of the team get a significantly higher salary? The manager/trainer might order them around, but does that make them belonging to a higher class, even if they earn way less than their "subordinates"?
you are misreading "owns a share of the hive, decides how many bees to hire/fire, where they work, when they work, what % of the honey to share with the worker bees"
Team managers/trainers do not meet most of those criteria.
At most the GM meets the majority of them.
Only the team owner would meet all the criteria.
That hive is too small to matter. Kind of like I don't really concern myself with all of the wildlife in Australia that would like to eat me. It doesn't affect me in the least day to day.
Amazon was once a small business. It's possible to grow that hive but the vast majority get exterminated.
Someone who has made twenty million for just a single year isn't working class even if they choose to continue working. They could immediately retire and perpetually draw on investments for an income several times higher than that of a person who's working for 150k.
The different levels of power and seniority is a class within a class. Different levels of money, power, and prestige (which seniority is a proxy for here) is all class is really
The only meaningful way to look at class is by looking at class interests. On the one hand, you have the capitalist class who own significant amount of capital and use this capital to further their wealth. On the other hand, you have working class people for whom selling their labour is the primary source of their income.
These two classes have largely contradictory interests. People who own companies want to cut their costs, and therefore they want to lower wages, give lower benefits, less time off, and so on. Workers want the exact opposite of that.
People such as CEOs constitute a labour aristocracy where their interests largely align with the interests of large capitalists and they own some capital of their own.
It's still
more complicated than that, as ultimately a non trivial number of people end up making more from investments than labor, just from savings and time. Basically every 45 year old developer in the US that tried to save at all is a capitalist in your book.
If capital gains hand someone 300k a year, they aren't quite workers, but they aren't playing the same game as someone who is still playing the accumulation game. It's the best trick the late 20th century played: Defined contribution workers are all also capitalists, just like everyone relying on an ever more valuable house.
I don't think it's that complicated actually. The basic question is whether the individual has to keep going to work to maintain their lifestyle. Pretty much every 45 year old developer out there wouldn't last long without having a job. They probably have a mortgage to pay on their house, they have car payments, credit card debt, and so on. They're not living off their capital even though they might own some capital.
An actual capitalist makes a living by using their capital as the primary vehicle to create further wealth for themselves and to sustain their lifestyle.
Again, the key distinction is in terms of class interests. What sort of social policies would be of interest to each type of individual is the question.
It is in part. A person on a US$20 million a year salary obviously isn’t working class or even middle class-they might truthfully say they are of “working/middle class background” (if their parents were of more modest means)
Whereas, their 10 year old kid whose annual income and assets are roughly $0 is also upper class-because their parents are. Now, if they grow up and their parents end up disowning them and they end up living on the streets homeless-then they won’t be upper class any more. But if that doesn’t happen, then they are-because even if they aren’t filthy rich yet, very likely they’ll eventually inherit a huge amount of money from their parents (assuming they don’t already have some kind of “you’ll never have to work a day in your life” trust fund set up for them). They could live their whole life in the upper class without ever getting a salary at all
I didn't mention salary. I mentioned other indicators; being an analyst for GS (probably went to an Ivy League school) who hangs out in the same restaurant as the CEO in the Hamptons
Class is also not these social/economic/cultural signifiers. As yogthos said in a different comment, differences in class are about having substantially different economic incentives. (I wouldn't go as far as GP and say they are unrelated. Of course they are strongly correlated. But they are different things in fundamental ways).
I think you're thinking too much about the restaurant. A CEO can go have a $1000 meal at the same place the analyst has a $200 meal. The CEO could even have the $200 meal. Even multi-millionaires might not want a seven course prix fix for lunch.
If the analyst lives in NYC and makes $250k they aren't living large. If they went to an Ivy League school and have to pay for it they really aren't living large. Regardless, the story makes the CEO look silly.
I am always surprised when I realize this in conversations with entrepreneurs. They explain something to me about how they “control” their employees, then I say it out loud that it seems weird to me and then they try to explain it to me like it has nothing to do with control or with class but that it is necessary. Sure. It’s mostly bullshit, class and mistrust.
This is so often overlooked and it's true. I've done well enough in my career that I've learned to be very cautious about how much I let others know about my standard of living. I've had experiences in the past where someone who either is or feels like they should be doing better than I am based on what little they know about me becomes indignant and acts like the natural order of things has been upended.
> The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class.
I doubt it. Companies that try to hire pedigree know that they are hiring from the same class. The disdain is shock from a junior not working 20 hour days and sleeping under the desk.
So many of the comments are acting as though the underling employee actually is of a different class.
I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.
This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.
You just made up a scenario that has a less than 50% probability of being true, in order to.. come to the defense of a CEO worth $100M+ ? LOL cmon man.
How is this a defense of the CEO? The CEO comes out looking not just like an ass, but an ignorant one.
When someone acts as entitled to be where they are and do what they do as that junior analyst to that CEO, it's because their life experience so far has told them, consistently, that they have every right to. It even mentions that he points out his other associates.
He's acting like he's meeting someone who's, at best, an equal, because from his perspective, he is.
I don't really care too much about what class X is considered, but it sure it weird trying to frame a 23YO making 200k out of college in the same sorts of language used to describe people on minimum wage barely affording rent.
Do people really think the "middle class" is dead? I feel middle class is an apt descriptor for someone who is living comfortably but also still needs to work to maintain their lifestyle.
I believe part of that is true based on the location and ivy league background but also the ceo has disdain for lower ranked employees appearing in his bubble and daring to appear on the same level
Idk that it was a defence of the CEO. Whatever class the analyst belongs to or thinks they belongs to, the CEO's behavior was clearly out of proportion.
Why are you pretending this analyst is the same or even should have the same affordances as the CEO? You might be shocked to find out the CEO even gets paid more!
Most people come up through the ranks and you can bet the CEO was one time an analyst with a demanding boss. After decades of work he made it to boss. You see this everywhere where you move up the ranks and things get better. That's the apprentice deal for all of history.
Part of his compensation is relative flexibility although I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
If you're very valuable to the firm (e.g. CEO) you can get away with more stuff. It's the natural order of things. I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
Why are you pretending like flexibility is something you cannot give freely ?
That's like saying all junior-level employees MUST carry a book on top of their heads all the time, and only C-Level executives get to skip that. If you give someone flexibility, you are not taking anything away from other people, so not giving it is only an unnecessary punishment for junior level employees.
It can turn into that, but on the flipside it's normal to get more privileges over time, either as a reward (raises, time off) or once you've shown you won't abuse it (WFH/flexibility).
You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
After you've been there a while, learned more and are more effective at your job, you're more likely to get the benefit of the doubt but even that has limits.
Why are we pretending like this is all weird? New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up and it's inappropriate that they just get the same consideration when compared to someone that's been there longer than the analyst has been alive. Have you guys ever worked a normal job before?
>> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
I've had co-workers in these situations for a long time. In theory there is no difference. But then...
- suddenly you can barely hear someone on a conference call because they are on a 4G-tether on a beach,
- or because there are tons of bar sounds in the background on a call
- or you have a production issue but cant get the person to screen-share because they are on low-bandwidth
I even had individuals who would block their entire calendar on WFH days and only take meetings on in-office days.
The problem is with those who abuse privileges, not with those who are honest.
Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done. Meetings can wait until I'm at the office because I'm too distracted to get real work done in my flex-desk.
Who cares if employee works at the beach?
You need to provide value not appearance of value.
>> Blocking off the day makes sense because you want get work done.
I'm sure there are cases there it doesnt matter, but I was mentioning cases where teams need to work with each other and are paid to work with each other. I specifically mentioned Production Support. How can production support meetings "wait until they are back at the office?" From my standpoint, it doesnt matter where they are (home or office) but if they have no connectivity and cannot jump into troubleshooting meetings during business hours, i'm not sure how this works for numerous situations.
Through my career, i've been on the hot-seat as live applications have gone down. Imagine a DB is down or a pipeline is broken, and my DBA co-worker says "sure, lets take it up on Monday when I'm back". Note, I have no admin rights to the DB.
I had a k8s cluster run out of disk space. I had no admin rights to fix this. If the k8s admin decided he could take the meeting a day or days later, it would be a total disaster.
> You're assuming that someone working from the Hamptons is as productive as working from a desk in the office or his own home. I highly doubt this is true and especially so for young junior employees.
We're assuming you even read the article.
It clearly says "how the underling walked up at a restaurant, introduced himself and pointed to associates with him"
i.e. it was more than 1 person. Maybe they are doing face-to-face training? Are you saying that's ineffective?
> New or junior employees need a lot of handholding to ramp up
That's exactly what's happening. Why are you assuming it's not?
Exactly. What if it was a "team building lunch" or they were all out meeting a client or they are all remote together in a summer share?
And of the CEO - was he meeting a client, the board, or simply out to lunch by himself or with family/friends/etc. The article is silent on this topic.
> I'm almost certain c suite often work a lot more and have higher demands than junior employees.
Lmao. I'm no where near C-Suite but I've also never worked as hard as I did as an intern/junior engineer. Moving up often means working less hard.
> I don't really see any other way around it apart from a dehumanizing process to treat everyone exactly the same regardless of capabilities
This post is about WFH, not treating everyone the same regardless of capabilities. Those are such different things that I'm convinced you must be arguing in bad faith.
Yeah, Elon Musk is currently CEO of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, owner/CTO of Twitter, and owner of The Boring Company. It is incredibly hard to believe that the C-Suite works hard when someone is able to multitask like that. Tesla is even a public company--the shareholders could have him removed if he was doing a bad job!
Visionary leaders that can also attract talent and delegate well are force multipliers. Hard work doesn’t mean it’s not easy for some and almost incredibly fast to accomplish for others.
He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed to be working".
He was just mad that underlings had the same flexibility that he, as CEO, had always had. This being the same CEO who jets around DJing on the side for fun and has connections to do so at pretty high levels. So even the "cool CEO" is in fact, NOT cool.
It's like getting mad at all the other idiots on the road making traffic, lol. What do you think you are?